Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 30: "The Astounding She-Monster" (1957)

This magnificent poster semi-accurately represents the contents of The Astounding She-Monster.

An impressive credit for Ashcroft.

Let's turn our attention to the career of Ronald V. "Ronnie" Ashcroft (born in either 1921 or 1923; died after a lengthy illness in 1988). Like Ed Wood, Ronnie hailed from the East, specifically New Bedford, MA. And just like Ed, Ronnie worked for a major film studio at the very beginning of his career. In Ashcroft's case, though, the studio was Twentieth Century-Fox, and his job there was working in their New York publicity office in the early 1940s. This experience gave the young man a taste for the film industry, and his plan was to become a cameraman. 

In a twist all too typical of the Ed Wood saga, Ashcroft was prevented from reaching his goal by the $1000 initiation fee demanded by the camera operators union. The course of his career and life, then, was changed by the relatively-affordable $250 dues of the editors union.

According to film historian Bruce Eder at the All Movie Guide, "Ashcroft spent years as an editor's assistant, and then moved up to jobs such as sound effects editor for some of the smaller producers; he fulfilled the latter capacity in Roger Corman's The Day the World Ended, in 1956, and was the editor on the independent feature Wetbacks, starring Lloyd Bridges." The Corman movie does not turn up on Ashcroft's obviously-incomplete IMDb filmography, nor do any references to Ronnie's work as an assistant editor. His movie and TV credits there stretch from 1956 to 1983. 

As Eder suggests, Ashcroft seems to have toiled mainly as a sound editor but also served as a film editor (including a gig working for Edgar Ulmer on 1959's The Naked Venus), producer, director, and writer. His film work seems largely confined to independent features, but Ashcroft found more mainstream employment on television, even landing an Emmy nomination for his work on Police Story in 1974. As a fan of 1960s rock and soul music, I was most impressed to see that Ashcroft had been an "audio consultant" on Steve Binder's The T.A.M.I. Show (1964), perhaps the most magnificent of all concert films.

Ronnie Ashcroft's true "golden age" stretched from about 1957 to 1962. That's when he was an independent producer-director in his own right, working for himself rather than for others. He directed three of his own productions: a sci-fi film called The Astounding She-Monster (1957) and two early, tame sexploitationers, Girl With an Itch (1958) and the Russ Meyer-inspired Like Wow! (aka Mr. Peek-a-Boo's Playmates) (1962). A fourth Ashcroft production, a Western called Outlaw Queen starring jazz bandleader Harry James, was directed by Herbert S. Greene.

Connections to Ed Wood abound in Ashcroft's career. Most obviously, he was Eddie's assistant director on Night of the Ghouls (1959) and produced the short film Trick Shooting with Kenne Duncan (circa early-to-mid-1960s). In addition, two of the Westerns on Ashcroft's resume, the aforementioned Wetbacks (1956) and Outlaw Queen (1957), were written by the mysterious "Pete LaRoche," an obscure scribe who might possibly have been Edward Davis Wood, Jr. operating under a pseudonym. We will examine the career of Mr. LaRoche more closely next week.

In the meantime, it's perhaps interesting to note that our good friend Kenne Duncan is in Outlaw Queen, while I. Stanford Jolley of The Violent Years is in both Wetbacks and Outlaw Queen. In fact, actor Duncan is the linchpin of the entire Ed Wood/Ronnie Ashcroft saga. "I met Eddie Wood at the home of my good friend, Kenne Duncan," Ashcroft explained to Rudolph Grey in the book Nightmare of Ecstasy.

One day during the making of Night of the Ghouls in 1958, Ed dropped by Kenne's place to give him some good news and bad news. The good news? For just $20, Eddie had rented a tiny studio called Picture Recorders from 6:00pm to midnight and had three sets ready to go. The bad news? His assistant director had quit on him, and Eddie desperately needed someone to corral the actors so that they'd know their lines and be ready to go when it was time to shoot. Being broke, Ronnie Ashcroft said, "I'm available!" Eddie hired him immediately. But an hour before filming got underway, Eddie, Kenne, Ronnie, and cinematographer Bill Thompson took time out to get sloshed at an establishment called the College Inn, where Ed blew through a stack of $100 bills he was supposed to be using as the cast's payroll. When Eddie and the gang finally arrived at Picture Recorders, the hapless director didn't have enough cash on hand to pay Tor Johnson, who then refused to work. Ah, the hazards of no-budget filmmaking, eh?

Curiously, Ronnie Ashcroft discussed his experience on Night of the Ghouls as if it were his first encounter with Edward D. Wood, Jr. But Ghouls was filmed in 1958, and as we shall soon see, Eddie was Ronnie's mentor on a film that had already been released the previous year...

THE ASTOUNDING SHE-MONSTER (1957)

British lobby card for the film.

Alternate titles: The Naked Invader [script title]; The Astounding She Monster [no hyphen], Mysterious Invader [British title]; the Italian title translates as She, the Monster.

Availability: Thanks to distributor Wade Williams, who plastered his own name over the opening shot despite having no hand in making the movie, this film is easily and cheaply available to the public. You can purchase it as a standalone DVD (Image Entertainment, 2012) or as half of a DVD double feature with Richard E. Cunha's 1958 film, She Demons (Image, 2003). If you'd prefer to stream or download the film instantly, you can do that as well.

The backstory: The 1950s were a fecund time for outlandish sci-fi films that fed off the Cold War paranoia of the Eisenhower Administration. For a few years there, America's drive-ins were treated to a seemingly endless succession of fright flicks about rampaging robots, monsters, and aliens of all descriptions. Sometimes the threats came from other planets or other galaxies, while other problems were of man's own making, brought on by overambitious scientists trying to play God.

Strangely, although intended strictly as light entertainment, these movies tended to be grim, fatalistic, and preachy with downbeat endings. But they had eye-catching posters and lobby cards, and their titles employed such telltale buzzwords as "invasion," "planet," "attack," "creature," "robot," "space," and "monster." These movies viewed science either as a near-magical panacea for all of mankind's problems or a menace that would wipe out civilization. Aliens (often appearing in humanoid form) were walking, talking metaphors for all kinds of social concerns, from the ever-looming threat of Communist Russia and the accompanying specter of mutually-assured destruction to the rise of youth culture, which was viewed by many adults as incomprehensible and therefore dangerous.

Although there were occasional "respectable" and high-minded studio-made science-fiction films, such as Fox's The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and MGM's Forbidden Planet (1956), the vast majority of these movies were cheap, quickly-made independent productions aimed squarely at the teenage audience. As the decade wore on, these low-rent flicks got even more gimmicky and outrageous in their attempts to conquer the lucrative youth market with sillier monsters and tackier titles. These are the movies that would eventually form the backbone of TV's Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1988-1999), where they were routinely mocked. 

Though they are fondly remembered by many, the science-fiction films of this era were not exactly highly regarded in critical circles, and they created the general perception among the public that the entire sci-fi genre was mere "kid stuff," a notion only partially dispelled by more serious fare like Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). It really wasn't until George Lucas' Star Wars (1977) became an across-the-board smash that the stigma was erased.

Ronnie Ashcroft's The Astounding She-Monster, for some reason, never turned up on MST3K, nor was it used by any of MST's spinoff projects like Rifftrax, The Film Crew, or Cinematic Titanic. I'm not sure why. It would have been perfect for their purposes, as it is flimsy and ludicrous, yet seems to take itself rather seriously. Its more-or-less brisk pace and merciful 62-minute running time also help. 

Ronnie Ashcroft, though not a rookie in the film industry, had never actually directed a movie before. For his inaugural feature, then, he apparently decided to keep the film's cast down to six people and limit nearly all of the action to a single location, a cabin said to be in California's San Gabriel mountains. The interiors were rather obviously shot on a set, but The Astounding She-Monster does contain a fair amount of location footage. Characters are seen driving on a remote highway, and there are a few sequences in a wooded area (probably Frazier Park, the same filming site as Fugitive Girls), plus several shots of a ritzy-looking neighborhood the script claims is the affluent West LA community of Brentwood, CA.

This being an Ed Wood-related movie, you can bet there is a generous amount of stock footage, too, specifically shots of animals, including a deer, a snake, and a bear. 

Stock footage of a real bear, intercut with shots of the director's wife wresting bear-suited Kenne Duncan.

The authorship of She-Monster is questionable. The credited screenwriter is someone named "Frank Hall," who has no other titles to his name. The IMDb cites Ronnie Ashcroft himself as an unbilled scribe on the project. It's my personal theory that Ronnie's buddy and mentor, Ed Wood, had at least some hand in crafting the screenplay. Maybe that's wishful thinking. What we do know of Eddie's direct involvement in the project comes from an anecdote related by Ashcroft to Rudolph Grey: 

I was cutting a sequence on The Astounding She-Monster. I got to a point where the invader comes upon a huge black bear. As the girl from outer space reaches out in a friendly gesture to touch the bear, it drops dead. I was having trouble with what we shot; I was very unhappy about it. Eddie came walking into the cutting room, and I told him my problem. He looked at the scene and said, "Listen, Ron, you go down to the costume company or maybe one of the prop houses and get one of those goddamn bear skins, not one of the silly things you wear to a party, but one that really looks real. And we'll get somebody into that bear skin and we'll go back to the same location." 

So, I got the bear skin. Eddie promoted Kenne Duncan to volunteer to get in the bear skin, and a whole gang of us went up to Frazier Park. [My wife] Lorraine got into the invader suit and put on the weird wig. Kenne crawled into the bear skin. Eddie grabbed the reflectors. Gene [Gropper] was on camera. We made a couple of takes, and all of a sudden we hear a voice coming from the bear. Kenne was yelling, "Goddamn it, stop, let me out of this thing!" Kenne had been smoking a cigarette in there, and the damn smoke was choking him! Anyway,  Eddie's idea worked out. he had a lot of savvy about the business, how to get out of tight spots. We ran the footage at the lab the next day. It was great and we were able to put it into the sequence. When it comes to friendships in Hollywood, they're rare. I'll say this about good old Eddie: whenever I was really in trouble and needed help, Eddie Wood was there.

That behind-the-scenes story, unfortunately, is more entertaining than the scene itself. What you actually see in the finished movie is some rather pedestrian stock footage of a black bear wandering through the woods, mixed in with shots of Shirley Kilpatrick, as the titular monster, looking bemused. Then, in a brief, blurry close-up, you see the director's wife (in a wig) strangling what appears to be a bearskin rug. There's some high-pitched growling on the soundtrack, though whether this is supposed to be coming from the alien or the bear I couldn't say. By the standards of low-budget sci-fi movies of the era, the sequence is borderline acceptable. Only for a split-second do we see the lifeless, immobile face of the bear.

Incidentally, though these inserts were shot by Gene Gropper, the movie's cinematographer of record is the redoubtable William C. Thompson, a key member of Ed Wood's inner circle. The Ray Mercer Company is responsible for the one big special effect in The Astounding She-Monster, namely a diffused shot of a lit match that stands in for the fiery meteor that transports the title character from a distant star to our planet.

Shirley Kilpatrick poses.

The cast, small though it is, does contain a few notable performers. Obviously, for Ed Wood fans, the most familiar name is D-list Western baddie Kenne Duncan (of The Sinister Urge, Crossroad Avenger and much more). "He damned near worked in every picture I made," Ronnie Ashcroft reminisced. "When he committed suicide [in 1972], I couldn't believe it. He was tired of living, just like [actor] George Sanders." 

While Kenne once again played the heel, this time a gangster who kidnaps an heiress, sturdy Oklahoma-born actor Robert Clarke (1920-2005) played the heroic leading man, a geologist whose chemistry skills prove useful in the clutch. Clarke went on to work for Ashcroft a few more times, including Outlaw Queen and Girl with an Itch. He appeared in literally dozens of films (The Man from Planet X, Bedlam, Back to Bataan, etc.) and TV shows (Dragnet, Knight Rider, Dallas, Dynasty, etc.) over the course of a half-century-long career. 

Among Clarke's final credits is Alienator (1990), a supposed remake of The Astounding She-Monster directed by another Ed Wood acolyte, Fred Olen Ray. The cast is loaded with B-movie stars: P.J. Soles, Jan-Michael Vincent, John Phillip Law, Ross Hagen, Robert Quarry. A similarly nostalgic all-star cast was assembled for Clarke's final film, The Naked Monster (2005), written and co-directed by Ted Newsom, who also made the documentary Ed Wood: Look Back in Angora (1994).

Clarke's leading lady in this film, Marilyn Harvey, had a much less durable and distinguished career but did get a smattering of TV work (including an episode of Gunsmoke) in 1962. Jeanne Tatum, who is hysterical (in both senses of that word) in this film as a boozy gun moll, also did some TV work (Dragnet, Rawhide) in the 1950s and 1960s; this is the most famous of her feature films. Kenne Duncan's rather dimwitted sidekick in the film is portrayed by multi-talented showbiz lifer Ewing Miles Brown, who played Wild Bill Hickok in last week's movie, Son of the Renegade. In 1977, working as a producer-director, Brown hired Ronnie Ashcroft to edit a family comedy called A Whale of a Tale, whose cast included William Shatner.

And we mustn't forget the film's real star, the She-Monster herself, Shirley Kilpatrick. Kilpatrick does not seem to have ever appeared in another movie besides this one, though she was at least considered for a role in Columbia's The Gene Krupa Story (1959) with Sal Mineo. Other than this movie, Kilpatrick's reputation rests on her career as a model and pinup girl from 1954 to 1965, during which she appeared in such now-forgotten men's mags as Gent, Gala, and Bold. She also stripped under the name Celeste Kirk. Shirley married a man named Villy Carpenter Jakobsen in 1987 and now lives in Sequim, WA. 

One persistent rumor about Ms. Kilpatrick is that she went on to cult stardom as plump character actress Shirley Stoler (1929-1999). Though there is a strong facial resemblance between the two Shirleys, there is ample evidence that they are not the same person. I think Kilpatrick looks a lot like Divine in John Waters' Pink Flamingos (1972). In a series of weird coincidences, "Shirley" was not only Ed Wood's drag name but was revealed to be the Divine character's birth name in the unproduced sequel, Flamingos Forever.

Three of a kind?: (from left) Shirley Kilpatrick, Divine, and Shirley Stoler.

The viewing experience: Delirious and delightful, if a bit downsized. Though Ed Wood's name appears nowhere in the credits of The Astounding She-Monster, his presence can seemingly be felt in every scene. 

The plot feels like at least two different kinds of stories (hostage drama and alien invasion) rather clumsily welded together and has that intangible dream-logic quality of Wood's most famous work. The dialogue, as per usual, is highly artificial: a mixture of baldfaced exposition, technical gobbledygook, and improbable slang. The cheapness and hastiness of the production are plain to see. The script takes rather outrageous liberties with science, and there is something naive and childlike about the characterizations -- as if the author had no idea how, say, a gangster or a geologist or a society heiress would behave or speak in reality.

If there is something that separates She-Monster from Plan 9 from Outer Space and Bride of the Monster, it is the fact that Ronnie Ashcroft's film is more streamlined than a 1950s Ed Wood film. Even when he had little time and less money, Eddie wasn't apt to scale back his ambitions the way Ashcroft did with this film, focusing on a small set of characters in one particular location. And, apart from a few eccentric flourishes, She-Monster's script takes fewer narrative and philosophical detours than most of Eddie's creations. The characters in Ashcroft's movie tend to focus on the plot as it unfolds and don't go off on lofty, random digressions in the true Wood-ian tradition. To put it simply, this is an Ed Wood movie on Ritalin.

A good companion to She-Monster.

The Astounding She-Monster begins the way many science-fiction films of the era did: with a pseudo-scientific prologue read to us by an authoritative, "voice of God"-type narrator. (If you're really into these, check out 1958's Terror from the Year 5000 for a definitive example.) I'm not sure why filmmakers started their movies this way so often back then. Perhaps it was to ground the ridiculous stories in something resembling reality. Or maybe it was to ward off criticism that these movies were just worthless trash with no redeeming social value. Anyway, while we glimpse into the farthest reaches of the cosmos, Mr. Announcer Man talks about the giant explosion that created the universe as we now know it. He doesn't use the term "big bang," though he could have, since that particular neologism dates back to about 1949.

The film takes the requisite left turn into absurdity when our storyteller speculates that this cosmic conflagration might have been the result of a nuclear explosion and that our current universe might have been accidentally created by the destruction of a previous one. It seems far-fetched to me, but one distant "star of the 12th magnitude," called (I think) Anterius is so concerned that nuke-happy Earth is going to commit "cosmic suicide" that it sends a sexy female emissary, the catsuit-clad She-Monster (Shirley Kilpatrick), via a glowing meteorite, to our planet. Her exact mission is unclear. Mr. Announcer Man says that Anterius wants to destroy Earth before we can do the same to it, but the ending of the movie reveals the She-Monster's intentions to be more peaceful than that. Continuity isn't exactly the movie's strongest suit, but then again, dreams aren't noted for their airtight continuity either.

After the opening credits, accompanied by Guenther "Gene" Kauer's Rite of Spring-esque score, the story proper begins. Again, Ronnie Ashcroft relies heavily on voiceover to explain what's happening to the audience, but the tone of the narration has changed entirely, so much so that I have to suspect that this film had at least two announcers. The IMDb lists Scott Douglas (who also appeared in Wetbacks) as "Narrator," plus Al Avalon (making his debut here) as "Radio Announcer." It's my guess that Avalon and Douglas switched off on voiceover duties, with the former performing the prologue and reciting most of the film's radio broadcasts -- the characters in She-Monster, you see, frequently tune into one of those convenient, only-in-the-movies radio stations that exist solely to provide periodic plot updates -- while the latter narrated the post-credits introductory scenes. While deep-voiced Avalon is bombastic, serious, and stentorian, Douglas is gossipy, sarcastic, and utterly unsympathetic to the characters, watching with haughty, detached amusement as terrible things happen to them.

As the story begins, a two-bit gangster named Nat (Kenne Duncan), his right hand man Brad (Ewing Miles Brown), and his socialite-turned-boozehound girlfriend Esther (Jeanne Tatum) are planning to kidnap wealthy heiress Margaret Chaffee (Marilyn Harvey) as she leaves her Brentwood home in a Cadillac convertible. Sounding a bit like a fey Rod Serling, storyteller Douglas makes it clear that he doesn't feel the least bit sorry for Ms. Chaffee:

Magaret Chaffee -- young, beautiful, and very rich. The beginning of a normal, carefree day in the life of a socialite. The normal, everyday problems that confront them. Overslept. Late for cocktails. Perhaps the Cadillac won't start. Just another, average afternoon. Too bad, Margaret. The Cadillac has not failed you. Ride swiftly. You have a very special appointment this day. An appointment that may very well change your life... or end it.   

For these three people, this day means the beginning of a job. A job so carefully planned for so many weeks. There's the gate, Margaret. Beyond it lies the most fantastic experience of your life. The wheels have started. Carefully laid plans have been put into operation. No use to struggle, Margaret. Being kidnapped could be considered almost normal for a wealthy socialite. And you are being kidnapped. In fact, you're all being taken to a rendezvous with fate. High in the San Gabriel mountains, the stage has already been set. No turning back now. But if they only knew. The best laid plans will go astray this day.

Vintage She-Monster lobby cards

Ashcroft's inexperience as a director shows a bit here. When Douglas mentions the "three" kidnappers, the director cuts to a shot of them in their car. Unfortunately, the way this image is framed, only Ewing Brown and Kenne Duncan can be seen; poor Jeanne Tatum is in the back seat and totally out of our field of view. One wonders if she was even present when this scene was filmed. Once Nat and his pals have scooped up Margaret, they take her for a ride on a remote-looking highway that passes some mountains and forested areas, right near where the She-Monster has landed.

The title character, clad in a skintight costume that in black-and-white looks like bare flesh, spends most of the movie wandering around the forest, killing everything with which she comes into contact. It's no trick, really, since she's teeming with radiation. Once she touches a living thing, it gets sort of a joy-buzzer-type jolt and then keels over dead. I'm reminded of one of Criswell's lines from Orgy of the Dead (1965): "I have but to touch you with my finger, and it would mean the end of you, all over!" Before she kills any humans, the She-Monster tests out her power on a few forest creatures, all of whom are represented by stock nature footage. In a moment that would not have been out of place in Bride of the Monster, Ashcroft cuts from a stock shot of a real snake to a staged shot of Shirley Kilpatrick halfheartedly tossing away a phony rubber serpent. Ms. Kilpatrick seems supremely bored and disengaged throughout the proceedings. Perhaps this is why she found no subsequent acting work.

It's worth pointing out that the film's title and poster make a big deal of the alien's femininity, but apart from Ewing Brown's comment that the monster resembles "a naked dame," sex has very little to do with the story. The movie can't truly be read as a parable about gender politics or women's role in society. Once all the facts about the She-Monster are in, we can only judge her to be a morally ambiguous character -- admirably motivated but indiscriminately destructive. The otherworldly being might as well have been genderless or neutered for all the difference it makes in this story.

Dim bulb Brad is spooked when he briefly glimpses the She-Monster and crashes Nat's car, forcing the party (including the three crooks and their victim) to relocate to a nearby cabin, occupied by square-jawed geologist Dick Cutler (Robert Clarke) and his loyal collie, Egan (played by Ashcroft's own dog). So snotty is narrator Scott Douglas that he even describes our thoroughly-nice hero and his adorable pet in an unflattering way, calling them "the ever-present 'innocent' bystander and his canine companion." That may not sound too terrible, but it's his tone of voice that makes it seem so nasty.

This is the point at which The Astounding She-Monster transmogrifies into the cinematic equivalent of a TV "bottle episode," with the criminals and their hostages confined to the remote cabin and everyone trying to figure a way out. Unfortunately for them, any time they set foot outside the cabin, they are immediately confronted by the She-Monster. These poor folks leave and then return to the same place so often that I started to think of the Pirandello-inspired Twilight Zone episode called "Five Characters in Search of an Exit." MST3K fans, meanwhile, will remember how that show dealt with the opening scenes from Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster, as two hapless characters kept winding up at the same spot over and over again.  ("We're back here! How did that happen?")

The She-Monster goes out just like the Wicked Witch.

From that point on, the story develops exactly as you'd guess that it would, with characters getting killed off every 10 minutes or so until only the hero and heroine, Dick and Margaret, are left. By then, apparently having gotten sick of the woods, the She-Monster has no qualms about just jumping through the window -- glass and all -- and menacing characters inside the cabin as well as outside. Dog lovers may be upset to learn that poor Egan is among the victims. There is a mistaken belief among some moviegoers that dogs always survive in movies, but MST3K viewers will know that filmmakers will occasionally kill off adorable pooches simply to demonstrate how very real the threat is. (See: Revenge of the Creature, The Deadly Bees, Manos, etc.) I think the one moment of this film that really affected me emotionally occurs when Dick Cutler announces his plan to retrieve Egan's body but is prevented from doing so by the She-Monster.

Ultimately, after a few comically absurd Mr. Wizard-esque discussions with Margaret involving alpha rays, gamma rays, platinum, radium, and "aqua regia," Dick intuits that the monster is protected from our atmosphere by a thin layer of protective metal. So he whips up some kind of all-purpose, alien-killing acid in his home laboratory, douses it on Shirley Kilpatrick, and watches her dissolve, Margaret Hamilton style. Only then do Dick and Margaret find the written message that the She-Monster had been concealing in her locket. Apparently, our extraterrestrial visitor was just dropping by to give us an invitation to join the Council of Planets, which is sort of like the NATO of Outer Space. The letter is in English, explains Dick, because the aliens must have been listening in to our shortwave radio broadcasts. Hmmm. That's even less plausible than the "dictorobitary" (language computer) from Plan 9.

And what about all the seemingly random, unprovoked killing? Well, Dick says that in retrospect, the She-Monster only killed when she was being attacked. After about five viewings of this film, I can say with certainty that this theory is complete and utter horseshit. Not only does Shirley Kilpatrick zap anything and everything that crosses her path, no matter how benign, there are a few moments when she takes obvious pleasure in terrorizing the other characters.

"Fun couple" Esther and Vic; Margaret in foreground.

Since the plot of the film is relatively straightforward and concise, Wood-ologists will have to look for their hero's trademark eccentricity in the dialogue and characterization instead. The She-Monster herself is a bit of a cipher, and the romantic leads are about as exciting as a pile of wet laundry. 

Fans will want to concentrate, then, on the characters of Nat and Esther, yet another scheming criminal couple of the type we've seen so often before. (Going into this project, I had no idea how many examples of those I'd find in Wood's work.) It's not difficult to see them as version 2.0 of Vic and Loretta from Ed's previous film, Jail Bait (1954). Always believable as a slimy lowlife, Kenne Duncan has loads of fun with the slang-slinging, belligerent Nat, and he's well matched by Jeanne Tatum as the hopeless alcoholic Esther, who gives off a strong "Ethel Mertz goes bad" vibe. The tenor of the Nat/Esther dynamic is established early with this wondrous dialogue:

Nat: Sit down, you lousy drunk! 

Esther: I prefer to be referred to as an alcoholic.

If Ed Wood has a surrogate in this movie, it's definitely Esther, who talks of nothing but alcohol (I'm not kidding!) for the entire movie and at one point declares, " If I could drink, I'd think better." A fairly long stretch of the film is devoted to a Mexican standoff in which Esther debates both Dick and Margaret about who will fetch more booze from the bedroom. Sadly, the very second she finally gets the bottle she's been negotiating for all this time, Nat shatters it with a bullet. The lousy rat! 

Foul-tempered Nat, for his part, is a one-man quote factory. He gets two of the film's most famous lines: (about Margaret) "Our young socialite has gotten up on her social register!" and (about Brad) "The way you keep puttin' your foot in your kisser, it's a wonder you don't get athlete's mouth." And Nat is the springboard for the script's one big, Wood-ian digression: a debate about capitalism, politics, and the redistribution of wealth. Esther has just been bragging about her former life as a wealthy landowner when Nat suddenly goes off on a rant:

Nat: The filthy rich! They're nothing but a bunch of parasites! 

Dick: Oh, I don't know. It seems to me, a lot of our modern American millionaires have earned their wealth. 

Nat: In a pig's foot! Just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Coincidence, that's all. Now you take a guy goes to the racetrack, picks a winner, collects a bundle. Did he earn it? Nah! Coincidence! 

Dick: Well, what's wrong with that? 

Nat: The point I'm making to you is that if there hadn't been a thousand little bettors bettin' on the same race, he wouldn't have won a thing! And the millionaire wouldn't have gotten his dough if there hadn't been a million little guys workin' their tails off! 

Dick: And it's your idea to redistribute the wealth more evenly among the little guys, is that it? 

Nat: Exactly! And since our society doesn't want to cooperate, then the little guy's gonna move in and take what he can get. 

Dick: Now that puts you in the category of a criminal. 

Nat: You're only a criminal when you're in the minority! Now you take a crook like Hitler was. Surround him with a million other crooks, and what do ya got? The ruling party of a country! And nobody thinks you're a crook anymore! 

Dick: So it's your idea to just move in and take what you can get. 

Nat: You said it, bub! And I can do it with my moxie! 

Esther: What he's pointing to is the hole in his head! 

Nat: Shut up, ya crummy lush!

Obviously, as a law-abiding, right-wing, pro-military super-patriot, Ed Wood would have thoroughly sided with Dick in this debate. And yet I cannot help but speculate that some of Nat's dialogue resonated with Eddie as well. Certainly, Ed Wood was a man who watched others in his profession get rich and famous undeservedly, while he toiled away for decades and earned very little money for his troubles. While I don't think Eddie wanted to "redistribute the wealth," I think he did feel that he just needed a few lucky coincidences to get on Easy Street. While I'm on this subject, I should also mention that in last week's movie, Son of the Renegade (1953), the elder Red River Johnny was somewhat of a Robin Hood figure who did "redistribute" some of what he stole to "whoever needs it the most." The definitive essay on the Macroeconomics of Ed Wood has yet to be written, I'm afraid.

As other critics have pointed out, there are a number of plot similarities between The Astounding She-Monster and Plan 9 from Outer Space, especially if you consider the films in the broadest possible terms. In both stories, an alien civilization is concerned that the inhabitants of Earth will one day destroy the entire galaxy, so they send an emissary to our planet in a desperate bid to prevent us from blowing ourselves up along with everything else in existence. Once here, said emissary embarks upon a sketchy, poorly-thought-out plan that makes no sense and mainly involves terrorizing random people in a fairly obscure location in the Los Angeles area. After it's all over, the surviving human characters remark how much more advanced the aliens are than Earthlings, even though their plan was a complete flop. Take this line from the last scene of The Astounding She-Monster:

Margaret: Obviously, this universal council is made up of people from worlds far more advanced than our own.

And compare it to this similar line from the last scene from Plan 9:

Col. Edwards: We've got to hand it to them, though, they're far ahead of us.

In both cases, amusingly, the aliens receive this high praise only after wiping out in spectacular fashion. Perhaps even as far back as the 1950s, Ed Wood was already presaging his own "success by failure." Maybe he was hoping that, long after his own death, the rest of humanity would look at his work and be amazed by how far ahead of the times he was. In a way, he got his wish. After all, Eddie's been gone about 35 years now, and yet here I am poring over his work. And there you are, reading about it. Perhaps Ed Wood knew something that his contemporaries didn't.

Next week: Let me tell you about a 1950s screenwriter named Peter "Pete" LaRoche. He had three screenplays produced in the 1950s, all low-budget Westerns, then was never heard from again. The third and final one was an Indian-themed sexploitation movie that was among the earliest so-called "nudie cuties" in Hollywood history, perhaps even beating Russ Meyer to the punch. Perhaps not coincidentally, it's also the only LaRoche film that seems to have survived into our time. 

But that's not the most interesting thing about Mr. LaRoche. No, what makes Pete so fascinating is that he seems to have never existed at all. He has no history, other than those three screenplay credits. No birth date. No death date. No photos of the man. No anecdotes from friends or coworkers. Nothing. The most popular theory, then, about the elusive Pete LaRoche is that he was really our very own Edward D. Wood, Jr., working under an assumed name. We'll dig into all of this in a mere seven days as we explore the enticingly-named Revenge of the Virgins (1959).

Mill Creek comedy classics #75: "Three Broadway Girls" (1932)

The Greeks may have had a word for them, but Hollywood had at least two names for their movie.

The flick: Three Broadway Girls (originally released as The Greeks Had a Word for Them* by United Artists, 1932; rereleased and retitled by Astor Pictures, 1947) [buy the set]

*The movie is based on a Zoe Akins play called The Greeks Had a Word for It; Zoe won a Pulitzer, but not for this.

Current IMDb rating: 6.5

Director: Lowell Sherman (successful actor-director of the 1920s and '30s; directed Mae West's She Done Him Wrong; also cameoed in The Stolen Jools; died two years after this while making a film called Becky Sharp)

Joan Blondell

Actors of note:

• Joan Blondell (durable supporting actress who played a lot of "best friend" parts; lengthy resume includes Grease, The Champ, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, much more)

• Madge Evans (perennial "nice girl" of the '30s; films include Dinner at Eight, David Copperfield, The Mayor of Hell, etc.)

• Ina Claire (1920s Broadway star; film career didn't amount to much, but she appeared in Ninotchka, Stage Door Canteen, and a few others)

• Lowell Sherman (directed this movie; see above)

• David Manners (frequent star of classic Universal horror films, including Dracula, The Mummy, and The Black Cat)

• Phillips Smalley (super-prolific actor-director of the 1910s; later appeared in the Marx Brothers' A Day at the Races and A Night at the Opera, plus Sunrise, The Phantom of the Opera, etc.)

• Sidney Bracey (Tod Browning's Freaks, the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup, plus Sunrise, Angels with Dirty Faces, hundreds more)

• Louise Beavers (Peck's Bad Boy with the Circus, Never Wave at a WAC, Palooka)

• Chreighton Hale (School's Out)

• Betty Grable (famous and beloved pin-up girl of WWII;  noted for "Million Dollar Legs"; movies include How to Marry a Millionaire and The Gay Divorcee; twelve years after this movie, she was the highest-paid star in America, earning $300,000 a year)

• Ward Bond (best known for TV's Wagon Train, but appeared in many of Hollywood's all-time classics)

Seductress Jean (Ina Claire) plies her trade.

The gist of it: Roommates Schatzi (Blondell) and Polaire (Evans) welcome their mutual friend, would-be gold digger and habitual schemer Jean (Claire), back to New York after a disastrous trip to Paris which left her (deservedly) penniless. Jean is initially angry that Schatzi is now involved with the unseen Pops, an elderly "sugar daddy," since Jean always wanted to land Pops for herself. But that night, the three single gals go out on the town with Polaire's steady beau, nice guy Dey (Manners), and pretentious concert pianist Feldman (Sherman), who's supposed to be Jean's escort for the evening. Feldman invites them all over to his place and focuses all his attention on Polaire, whom he promises to turn into a successful pianist in her own right. Sensing defeat, Dey slinks off. But Jean sticks around and manages to seduce Feldman anyway.

The humiliated Polaire gets into a cab, which crashes into a milk truck. She survives, but the accident puts her in the hospital. As Schatzi predicted, Jean and Feldman's relationship doesn't last. When Dey finds out Polaire is in the hospital, he rushes to visit her and their romance is immediately rekindled, resulting in an engagement. Seeking revenge, Jean frames Polaire for stealing a strand of pearls, humiliating Polaire in front of both Dey and Dey's wealthy father, Justin Emery (Smalley). Dey and Polaire break up, and Jean ends up engaged to Justin! On the day of Justin and Jean's wedding, Schatzi and Polaire show up at the Emery home, supposedly to retrieve a good luck charm Jean borrowed from Polaire. Instead, they get Jean drunk and convince her to accompany them on a trip to Paris. The three women sneak out of the house while the wedding guests are arriving. Realizing he can't live without Polaire, Dey chases after them, hoping to catch them before they board a cruise ship bound for Europe.

My take: "Throughout the Ages, half of the women of the world have been working women... and the rest have been working men." So says the not-too-funny caption which begins this slight, forgettable battle-of-the-sexes comedy. Three Broadway Girls plays like a Prohibition-era version of a TV sitcom I wouldn't normally watch. It's about three worthless young women who spend their lives in pursuit of some equally worthless men. The characters party, drink, smoke, and lounge around constantly, and no one seems to have any real problems. So it was difficult to give a good goddamn what happened to these folks.

As indicated above, this movie was based on a successful stage play, and its roots in the theater are fairly obvious. This is a very talky, set-bound movie which is limited to a small handful of locations. Director Lowell Sherman, who is also fairly funny as pianist Boris Feldman, moves his camera around a little more than other low-budget comedy directors of the era, but there's no disguising the claustrophobia of this movie. The script is very heavy on self-consciously witty banter, and I think it might have played a little better with a live audience. Onscreen, it just kind of lays there, and the film feels inert and airless.

The trio of actresses at the center try to overcompensate by saying their lines with a lot of nervous energy, but it gets kind of shouty and annoying for my taste. Maybe they're trying to distract us from the fact that the so-called "friendship" between Jean and the two other girls is simply not believable. You could almost call Jean a "frenemy" to Schatzi and Polaire, but she never does a single nice thing for either of them and is eternally ungrateful. selfish, and duplicitous. Why were they ever friends with this woman in the first place? The likely reason is that the movie desperately needs a "wild card" character such as Jean to enliven the proceedings.

Joan Blondell and Madge Evans are given underwritten, unexciting roles, while outrageous, wisecracking Ina Claire walks away with the film and seems to be the only one really having any fun here. It's no surprise that Lowell Sherman also directed a Mae West film, since the sex-loving, man-hungry Jean is very West-like in Three Broadway Girls. She seems to have very little in common with the two others. The character of Jean, then, is both an asset and a liability to this film. She gets most of the script's funniest lines, but her character is so implausible that she's a distraction.

Is it funny: Well, I'd say I got a good, solid laugh about once every 10-15 minutes during Three Broadway Girls. The flirtatious game of cat-and-mouse between Jean and Feldman is good for a few slightly naughty chuckles, and I liked how utterly unimpressed Jean was by Feldman's concertizing. She blatantly snoozes through the one recital she attends and informs Feldman on their first meeting that she hates music. I also liked how Jean skillfully cons a fellow cruise ship passenger into paying for her hefty bar tab early in the movie. There are a few amusing moments that don't involve Jean, too, as when a drunk bumps into a snooty maitre d'.

Drunk: Waiter, I'm looking for a place to wash my hands. 

Waiter: (gesturing) There's a room there marked "Gentlemen," but don't let that stop you. You go right in.

Now I'm waiting for an opportunity to use that line in real life. By the way, there's some good visual humor in the film, too, as when Schatzi and Jean meet at a beauty parlor where women pay to have their hair attached to what look like dozens of ceiling-mounted electrodes.

My grade: C+

P.S. - Racial/ethnic content is fairly low in this flick. Much is made of Jean's status as an "Eye-talian," but I couldn't be sure if it was supposed to be a compliment or an insult. There are a few African-American servant (or servile) characters seen in the background, including our old pal Louise Beavers, but nothing offensive.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week #29: "Son of the Renegade" (1953)

In the early days of his career, Ed Wood assisted B-list cowboy actor Johnny Carpenter.

Party pooper Martin Luther

The word "apocrypha" is most commonly used today to denote ancient religious books that do not appear in the standard Old or New Testaments because their authenticity is dubious or contested. Instead, they are shunted off to their own section of the Bible... and only in certain, extra-complete editions. A great many Bibles skip right past them. The next time you're at a motel, check out one of those standard-issue Gideon jobs in the nightstand. Guess what you won't find there? That's right, the Apocrypha. No Book of Wisdom or Gospel of Gamaliel for guests of the Super 8.

You can blame a lot of this on notorious party pooper Martin Luther, who made a big honkin' deal out of the canonicity of certain books way back in the 1500s. I first encountered the word "apocrypha" as a kid when I was looking through my parents' personal library and found a weird, extended-play Bible with a bunch of middle chapters I'd never heard of. My folks were Catholic, and our faith supposedly considered these books to be full-fledged 100% genuine. I couldn't help notice, though, that these particular works were never excerpted in the missalettes we used at mass each week or mentioned in the sermons either.

The books of the Apocrypha were like those oddball relatives who were still on the Christmas card list, even if they were never actually invited over to our house. I spent about an hour or so thumbing through these vaguely-mysterious pages, probably because the word "Apocrypha" sounded vaguely sinister and I figured that these yellowing chapters might contain some dark magic. But, no, they were just as snoozy and impenetrable as the rest of the Bible was to me at the time. Oh, well. Can't blame a kid for trying.

"Apocrypha" is also a handy term to use when discussing the career of Edward D. Wood, Jr. This was a man who toiled in the often-shadowy outskirts of the entertainment industry for thirty years -- sometimes under his own name (e.g. Plan 9 from Outer Space), sometimes under a pseudonym (e.g. Necromania, where he was "Don Miller"), sometimes anonymously (e.g. Shotgun Wedding). It's that third category that concerns us now as we prepare to delve into what one fan site has dubbed "The Ed Wood Apocrypha." Strictly speaking, these are movies whose connection to Ed Wood cannot be verified definitively. Eddie's participation in these films falls somewhere between "nearly certain" and "quite possible."

Sorry to be so mushy and nebulous here, but it's one of the hazards of the job. The good news is that covering these movies allows me to explore certain facets of Ed Wood's career that I might otherwise not have covered in this series.

Take, for instance, Eddie's early '50s apprenticeship under a B-list cowboy actor...

SON OF THE RENEGADE (1953)

Images from Johnny Carpenter's Son of the Renegade

Alternate title: Son of the Outlaw

Availability: You purists who insist on physical media can pick up this movie on a bare-bones DVD (Alpha Home Entertainment, 2009). TCM sells it, too. If you're into streaming video, you can rent it for $1.99 or buy it for $9.95 through Amazon. The fact that Alpha Video is handling this movie means it's in the public domain. Archive.org has made it available for streaming or downloading.

Johnny Carpenter's big four.

The backstory: Jasper "Johnny" Carpenter (1914-2003) is an intriguing peripheral character in Hollywood history. A native of the Ozarks, he learned to ride horseback on his father's Debinsville, AR farm. Carpenter's boyhood dreams, though, were not of cowboy fame. No, he wanted to become (of all things) a baseball player. Could have made it, too... that is, if he hadn't been hit by a car in 1936, broken his back, snapped his leg in seven places, suffered internal injuries, spent four months in a body cast, and taken roughly eight full years to recuperate.

Though his injuries would inspire him to do extensive and commendable charity work with the handicapped for the rest of his life, the terrible car accident definitively put an end to his baseball days and squelched his chances of taking a promised spot on the Chicago White Sox. Instead, Johnny and his brother, Frank, migrated to California, where they sought work as actors and stuntmen in the movies.

 An excellent rider and a capable if uninspiring actor, Johnny Carpenter started racking up lots of uncredited work along these lines in the early 1940s and even did Mickey Rooney's riding for him in National Velvet (1944). A few years later, producer Jack Schwarz started giving Johnny bigger roles in productions like Border Outlaws (1950) and Cattle Queen (1951). As Westerns moved from the big screen to the small screen, Johnny landed acting work on such shows as Death Valley Days, Judge Roy Bean, The Cisco Kid, 26 Men, and more.

If Carpenter has a claim to cult stardom, though, it's from his four self-produced, ultra-low-budget 1950s Westerns: Son of the Renegade (1953), The Lawless Rider (1954), Outlaw Treasure (1955), and I Killed Wild Bill Hickok (1956). In addition to starring in these films, he is also listed as the sole screenwriter for each one. The only problem? "Johnny Carpenter couldn't write a story to save his life." At least that was the verdict of actor Henry Bederski, who claimed that Carpenter was merely trying to promote himself by hogging all the credit. (One might wonder, however, why the supposedly egocentric actor would bill himself as "John Forbes" in Outlaw Treasure and Bill Hickok.)

This is the point where a certain Hollywood up-and-comer named Edward D. Wood, Jr. enters the narrative. Eddie and Johnny were buddies in the early 1950s, right around the time Carpenter was trying feverishly to turn himself into a Western screen idol. In Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy, Carpenter talked about his relationship with Ed. Forty years after the fact, Johnny was somewhat more willing to share the credit for his films... or spread the blame, as it were:

We were writing The Lawless Rider in his house at Riverside Drive and Victory Boulevard. Ed did everything. He was writer, production assistant, helped get people for me. We worked for each other for nothing. He would write a line of dialogue, and I would tear it up and throw it away. His dialogue was a little bit too perfect. The choice of words was not correct for the frontier.

Johnny Carpenter's version of events raises some interesting questions and also gives us some biographical insight into Ed Wood's life.

First off, if Ed had a house at or near the intersection of Riverside and Victory, that would put him in the cozy suburban community of Glendale, CA. Maybe, then, the love nest Ed shares with Dolores Fuller in Ed Wood (1994) is not as far-fetched as I'd originally thought. Several of Eddie's friends remember him acquiring and then losing houses with some regularity. This could have been one of them.

Meanwhile, Johnny's story indicates that Ed performed a number of duties for him, including screenwriting. Interestingly, the title mentioned by both Johnny Carpenter and Henry Bederski in their interviews with Rudolph Grey was The Lawless Rider from 1954. Bederski felt that Eddie wrote Lawless all by himself; Carpenter's comments suggest that the screenplay was at least a collaboration. Either way, we have confirmation of Ed Wood's participation in the project -- straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak.

Unfortunately, despite inquiries to Western film collectors and rare movie buffs, I was unable to procure a copy of Lawless. A few Ed Wood fan sites (and Wikipedia) claim that our favorite auteur also worked on Carpenter's previous vehicle, 1953's Son of the Renegade. Since this was easily located, I watched it instead to gain some insight into this less-documented phase of Ed Wood's career.

Renegade's director, Reg Browne

For all his multitasking, Johnny Carpenter never tried his hand at directing. Instead, Son of the Renegade was helmed by California-born Reg Browne (1911-1981), a multifaceted Hollywood technician with the diverse, "a little of this, a little of that"-type resume of a career journeyman. This was Browne's one and only theatrically-released feature film as a director, however. His other directing work came, not surprisingly, in the very same 1950s Western TV shows that were rapidly making movies like this one obsolete. Two of those series, 26 Men and Judge Roy Bean, also threw some temporary employment Johnny Carpenter's way, if that's any consolation.

Browne also worked as a film and sound editor in television and movies from about 1943 to 1970, eventually branching out (by professional necessity) beyond the Western genre with such future "rerun classics" as The Dick Van Dyke Show, Tarzan and Gomer Pyle, USMC. As for his movie career, poor Mr. Browne was also one of the unlucky bastards tasked with editing the dismal Cold War comedy When the Girls Take Over (1962), trying to shape the hopeless footage into some kind of coherent narrative and failing.

For Ed Wood fans, though, the most interesting names in the crew of Son of the Renegade are Harry Thomas and Bill Thompson, respectively the makeup man and cinematographer for all of Wood's early classics, including Glen or Glenda? (1953)and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959).

Meanwhile, Renegade's cast is filled with Johnny Carpenter's loyal but not-particularly-talented stock players: Whitey Hughes, Bill Coontz, Roy Canada, Verne Teters, and Bill Chaney. It was Carpenter's usual practice to bring in a couple of high-profile "ringers" for the sake of professionalism. Here, those duties fell to Jack Ingram (Boom Town, Lost in Alaska) and Henry Wills (Stagecoach, Shane).

In fact, Renegade was filmed at Jack Ingram's ranch on Mulholland Dr. -- a popular filming location for TV and movie Westerns, including Ed's unsold pilot, Crossroad Avenger (1953). Unfortunately, one Carpenter regular who does not turn up here is old sourpuss Kenne Duncan, star of Ed Wood's Night of the Ghouls (1959) and The Sinister Urge (1960). Duncan does appear in The Lawless Rider, as you might have guessed. And again, if I could have reviewed that movie instead, I would have. It just wasn't in the cards for this project.

As for female talent, Son of the Renegade has three prominent roles for women -- a rarity for a cowboy shoot-'em-up of this nature. After Carpenter himself, the top-billed cast members are Lori Irving, Joan McKellen, and Valley Keene. None of these young ladies amounted to much in the movie or television industries, but McKellen and Keene (rivals for Johnny's affection here) both wound up with uncredited bit parts in Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (1960).

As for Johnny Carpenter, his earnest campaign to turn himself into a Western screen idol was supremely ill-timed. In his affectionate but clear-eyed essay on Carpenter's career, film historian Boyd Magers laments, "Johnny didn't get started until it was nearly all over." How typical of Edward D. Wood, Jr. to hitch his wagon to a falling star like this.

But Wood must have had a genuine affection for Johnny Carpenter, because he cast the ex-cowboy as Police Captain Robbins in Night of the Ghouls. In his later years, after his TV and movie career had bitten the dust, Johnny devoted himself fully to working with handicapped children, allowing them to tour his "Heaven on Earth" ranch free of charge. He died of cancer almost eleven years ago in a Burbank nursing home at the age of 88, his philanthropy having long since overshadowed his film work.

A dying breed by the '50s.

The viewing experience: Surprisingly enjoyable! Despite its utter corniness -- or, better yet, because of it -- Johnny Carpenter's Son of the Renegade was entertaining enough to sustain me through several viewings. Certainly, the film's quick pace and one-hour running time were points in its favor. Compared to Stephen C. Apostolof's moribund 90-minute skin flicks, which I've been watching for the last two months, this movie was downright nimble!

For a project like this, the supreme question is: Does this movie bear any of the hallmarks of Edward D. Wood, Jr.? Luckily, the answer is yes -- more so in the plot and structure than in the dialogue. (See Johnny Carpenter's comments above to find out why that is.) Keep in mind that Son of the Renegade is not a movie with great philosophical depth, nuanced storytelling, or emotional complexity.

This ain't John Ford or Sergio Leone or Sam Peckinpah. Instead, this is closer to the film work of Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy, and Roy Rogers. Hoppy, Gene, and Roy didn't make "Westerns"; they made cowboy movies. There's a distinct difference. The primary audience for cowboy movies was young boys, and until television came along and shuffled the deck, the venue of choice was the Saturday matinee show at the local bijou, where for a few measly coins a viewer would get two features (each about an hour in length), a cartoon, a newsreel, and maybe the latest chapter in an ongoing serial.

A "good" cowboy movie might feature a lot of gunplay, with plenty of smoke and noise, but little to no bloodshed. The hero could have a love interest, generally a loyal "gal" who sticks with him through thick and thin, but a cowboy picture wouldn't waste much time on "mushy stuff." Furthermore, the good guys and bad guys are clearly delineated in these films (often color-coded by their hats), and the script of any decent cowboy picture would end with the former being rewarded and the latter being either killed or jailed.

In Hollywood Rat Race, a book that contains several anecdotal mentions of Johnny Carpenter, Ed Wood talks about the transition from good old-fashioned cowboy flicks to hoity-toity Westerns as he discusses the career decline of actor Tom Keene:

Ironically, it wasn't that Tom couldn't change with the tide, it was the Western itself that changed so fantastically. The cowboy film was no longer a cowboy film, it was a "Western." It wasn't a clear battle between hero and villain, good and evil. Now the hero had to have doubts about his achievements. Everyone needed a dose of neurosis and to be up to their ears in Freudian, subconscious problems. (pg. 68)

Later in Hollywood Rat Race, Ed mourns the moral decline of the genre:

Even the Westerns got into the swing of sex. No longer did the cleanly dressed cowboy kiss his horse and ride off into the sunset to begin another adventure. Instead, he began to wear the dirtiest clothing, kick his horse in the ass, and take the roughest dance hall broad into the hayloft with him. (pg. 108)

Johnny is unmoved by fallen woman Valley.

In these passages, Ed Wood sounds like a dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist who was resentful of change and who longed for a return to simplicity and moral turpitude. Son of the Renegade is a perfect example of the old school cowboy films that Ed loved so much. The film is very much a showdown between good and evil.

Leading man Johnny Carpenter not only dresses immaculately, with a fringed buckskin jacket and a neckerchief, but also displays flawless grooming, diction, grammar, and manners, qualities that today make him seem faintly ridiculous in such a rough-hewn setting. And while the script provides at least three potential love interests -- a good girl (trustworthy Joan McKellen), a bad girl (sultry Valley Keene), and a platonic friend (bland Lori Irving) -- for Carpenter, there is nothing even vaguely sexual about his character. Here, for instance, is how he relates to the movie's designated "fallen woman," Valley, who tries to seduce Johnny but is really in cahoots with one of the bad guys, Billy (Bill Chaney):

Valley: Johnny, we've been riding together for three hours, and you've hardly spoken to me. Am I that uninteresting? 

Johnny: That isn't it, Valley. I just don't have time for anybody. 

Valley: (suggestively) There's always time if you want it. 

(Johnny just stares stoically off in the distance.)

Valley's wanton, carnal nature is revealed in her relatively intimate and sensual scenes with the villainous Billy, who vaguely hints that the two have had some "good times" together. It's telling of this movie's Scarlet Letter-esque morality that Valley is killed off even though she switches sides and ends up helping Johnny against Billy. Clearly, this is a woman who has given in to the weaknesses of the flesh, and for that she must pay the ultimate price. Only by dying and thus inspiring a preachy eulogy from Johnny is she truly redeemed. Meanwhile, it's pure-of-heart, tomboyish Dusty (McKellen) who finally coerces a marriage proposal out of Johnny.

I alluded earlier to this movie's thematic and structural connections to the rest of the Ed Wood canon, and indeed there are many of both. Just like Ed Wood's Jail Bait (1954), this film's plot contains a payroll robbery and yet another scheming criminal couple. Like most of Eddie's classics from the 1950s, including Plan 9 and Glenda, Son of the Renegade relies heavily on voiceover narration, montages, screaming newspaper headlines, and lots of flat, expository dialogue to help the plot along. Offscreen storyteller Pat McGeehan (The Loretta Young Show) -- who sounds less like Criswell and more like a folksy, backwoods Lionel Barrymore -- gets some of the more colorful lines in the script. Here, for instance, is his ridiculously lengthy opening spiel, which reads like the first page of a Western dime novel:

The infamous duel

Red River Johnny was coming home. With him rode the sons of men who had ridden with his father. They were determined to help him claim his heritage -- peacefully if possible, by force if necessary. Red River Johnny had inherited his father's name. He'd earned his reputation in defense of that name. 

Home had been a ranch in the valley until he was 15. Been on his own ever since then. But the story had begun long before he'd been born. Justice had not yet come to the valley, and each man carried the law in his holster. A split second was the difference between being judge and jury or a bullet-ridden corpse in the dust. His father had earned the bitter resentment of a man named Three-Fingers Jack and the smoldering hatred that erupted into a blazing gun duel. 

With the echo of that last shot, Johnny had blasted himself loose from society. Recovering from his wounds, Johnny had found himself an outcast, wanted for murder. Other men, equally contemptuous of authority, were soon riding with him. Men like himself who lived and died by the gun. Men who'd committed acts of lawlessness beyond pardon. Men with a price on their heads. Men whose guns were notched with the scores of their killings. Men whose pictures bore the caption, "WANTED." 

Condemned to death, his property confiscated, Johnny had become an outlaw. His roaring six shooter had earned him the nickname of Red River Johnny, a synonym for bloodshed and terror throughout the entire Southwest. He deserved his reputation. Fearless and without regard for the risk, he would leave his men outside town and enter alone to plan each holdup.

Whew! That was a workout. It takes four whole minutes before any of the on-camera characters actually speak to one another. Another Wood-ian touch is the use of flashbacks. Rather confusingly, Son of the Renegade introduces its main characters, then almost immediately discards them to tell the story of their progenitors. We don't rejoin the main story until the 15-minute mark. By then, the movie is one-quarter over already! One is reminded of the convoluted Rube Goldberg-esque construction of Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda? script, which stops at one point so that Bela Lugosi can remind us that "the story has begun!"

Like father, like son?: The two Red River Johnnys.

More interesting, though, is the quintessential Wood-ian theme of resurrection. In his book, Ed Wood, Mad Genius, critic Rob Craig astutely points out that many of Eddie's films deal with bringing the dead back to life, either literally (e.g. the zombies of Plan 9) or figuratively (e.g. the surgical "recreation" of Don Gregor in Jail Bait). Perhaps nowhere in the Wood canon is the theme of symbolic resurrection more prominent than in Son of the Renegade. The entire movie is about a group of men -- a whole generation, really -- replaying their parents' rivalries.

The basic plot of the film is this: A ranch owner named Red River Johnny (Carpenter, in not-too-shabby old age makeup by Harry Thomas) shoots and kills his rival, Three-Fingers Jack (Jack Ingram), and becomes a feared outlaw, even quicker on the draw than Wild Bill Hickok (Ewing Miles Brown). In opting for a life of crime, Red River Johnny forfeits his rightfully-owned property and is chased out of the territory by relentless lawman Bat Masters (Frank Ellis). 

Years later, his now-grown son, who is also called Red River Johnny (and is also played by Carpenter) returns to reclaim the ranch and redeem the family name. He is abetted in these efforts by the sons of the same "lawless" men who had once ridden with his father. Bat Masters' son, Bat Masters, Jr. (Verne Teters), has become the new sheriff in town and is prejudiced against the younger Red River Johnny, whom he assumes is a thief and murderer just like his daddy. A crook named Billy (Bill Chaney), who at one point is called "Wild Bill," wants the Red River Ranch for himself, so he frames Johnny for a series of holdups. Billy, however, must vie for control of his gang with brutal, ruthless Jack (Ingram again), son of the man Johnny's father killed.

So we have two Johnnys, two Bats, two Jacks, and two Bills. The whole movie is about people paying for the "sins of their fathers," a phrase that also figured prominently in Ed Wood's Jail Bait (1954). Renegade and Jail Bait make interesting counterpoints to one another, as the first is about an honorable man trying to distance himself from his criminal father's bad name and the second is about a criminal who tarnishes his father's good name.

I had never really thought about it until covering this movie, but Ed Wood himself "had inherited his father's name," too. The life and personality of Poughkeepsie postal worker Edward D. Wood, Sr. has been inadequately documented thus far. Ed's mother, Lilian Wood, actually looms much larger in the legend of the infamous filmmaker. Armchair psychologist that I am, I have to wonder whether Ed Wood identified more with the son from Renegade or the son from Jail Bait. Was the second-hand name of his father a blessing or a curse?

Either way, Son of the Renegade is a fun watch for Ed Wood fans. While I screened it for this article, I could not help but remember Danny Peary's essay on Glen or Glenda? in Cult Movies 3, in which the critic says that Ed's debut movie features "acting such as you'd find on The Lone Ranger." Son of the Renegade features the exact same kind of acting -- monotone, halting, self-conscious, full of ill-timed pauses and mis-emphasized words.

Other reviews point out how juvenile the plot of Renegade is, the kind of thing a slightly precocious twelve-year-old might come up with. To me, these factors add to the charm of this obviously-cheap, obviously-sincere Western morality tale. It's like kids playing "cowboys" in their back yard, only on a much grander scale. As ridiculous as this film is, I found it aesthetically very pleasing, and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in either Ed Wood or Johnny Carpenter.

Next week: Our examination of the Ed Wood apocrypha continues unabated with another film the man "probably" worked on. This one should be especially exciting, because it marks a return for this series to the realm of science-fiction, the genre for which Ed Wood is best known. In this case, the movie in question is yet another notorious public domain cheapie from the 1950s, one in which he acted (according to some) as an unbilled "consultant" to director Ronald V. Ashcroft. Did Ed Wood manage to put his indelible stamp on this picture from the sidelines? Is it a worthy addition to the canon? I guess we'll find out about all of this in seven days, when I examine The Astounding She-Monster (1957).